Last month, 350.org founder Bill McKibben published a must-read op-ed about the failure of the media and others to connect any dots between recent extreme weather events and climate change.  Stephen Thomson of Plomomedia has combined McKibben’s words with striking images.

Underscoring McKibben’s point is an uber-lame New York Times story today, “As Arizona Fire Rages, Officials Seek Its Cause,” which, you guessed it, is dot free.   Meteorologist Dr. Jeff Masters wrote Friday, “The return of critical fire conditions this weekend means that the Wallow fire will likely become Arizona’s largest wildfire in history.”

Before taking on the NYT piece, let’s look at the video:

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John Cook, in a Skeptical Science cross-post

For years, I’ve been casually accumulating a database of peer-reviewed climate papers. A few months ago, some Skeptical Science contributors began brainstorming creative ways to visualise this database – a kind of visual sequel to Naomi Oreskes’ famous Science paper on consensus. Paul D decided to take it a step further and began programming a Javascript visualisation that very cleverly packs an incredible amount of information into a single, user-friendly graphic.

The visualisation displays the number of climate papers published each year, sorted into skeptic/neutral/pro-AGW categories (more on these categorisations shortly). What really blew me away is the slider at the bottom — drag it from left to right to observe the evolution of climate science research from Joseph Fourier in 1824 to the flood of research in 2011.  [Click on image to access visualization with slider].

How the Interactive History of Climate Science works

The Interactive History of Climate Science displays the number of climate papers published in each year from 1824 to 2011.

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Congress has done little to help national parks once it's created them. Yellowstone photo source via AP.

 

Tom Kenworthy, CAP’s western expert, in a Politico op-ed.

With summer approaching, it’s a good time to reflect on the value of our system of public lands — a heritage unmatched anywhere in the world and one that owes much of its strength to the 1906 enactment of the Antiquities Act.

Last week marked the 105th anniversary of this pioneering U.S. land conservation statute. Former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt marked the date with a speech Wednesday at the National Press Club urging the Obama administration to be more resolute in protecting public lands — which are again under attack.

A valuable place to start is to take a look back to before the bill passed. In 1897, more than a decade into a long campaign to make the Grand Canyon a national park, an Arizona newspaper, The Williams Sun, scorned the idea as a “fiendish and diabolical scheme” that would undermine the state’s economic future, which “depends exclusively upon the development of her mineral resources.”

Supporters of that national park proposal, the Sun declared, must have been “suckled by a cow and raised by an idiot.”

A century later, the “fiendish and diabolical scheme” generated $660 million a year in tourism spending in northern Arizona and supported about 12,000 jobs, according to a Northern Arizona University study. More recently, it took just a decade after the controversial 1996 designation of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah for visitors to spend $20.6 million a year in surrounding counties and keep 430 Utah residents employed, according to Utah State University.

These history lessons come to mind courtesy of Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-Mont.). He’s the latest in a long line of Western demagogues who’ve tried to make a career out of opposing greater protections for federal lands and whipping up anti-Washington fervor with nonsensical talk of federal land grabs.

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